April 10, 2006 — In addition to this week's NewsBreaks article and the monthly NewsLink Spotlight, Information Today, Inc. (ITI) offers Weekly News Digests that feature recent product news and company announcements. Watch for additional coverage to appear in the next print issue of Information Today. For other up-to-the-minute news, check out ITI’s Twitter account: @ITINewsBreaks.

LexisNexis (http://www.lexisnexis.com) announced an alliance with Newstex (http://www.newstex.com) to deliver Newstex Blogs On Demand via the LexisNexis online service. Newstex licenses blog content directly from independent bloggers and then takes in each carefully selected blog feed in text format and uses its proprietary NewsRouter technology to scan it in real time. The new blog content is designed to help LexisNexis customers who want to track and segment what key influencers are saying in their blogs in addition to the traditional news outlets. LexisNexis said the blog content would be integrated into the new Nexis flagship service in the next few months.

Newstex automatically tags each blog post with company names, stock tickers, key executives and government officials, and detailed topical categories. Each blog post delivered as part of Newstex Blogs On Demand will include Newstex's proprietary PeopleTickering—a system that synthesizes metadata from numerous premium sources and quality blogs to create a database of people who make the news.

Source: LexisNexis

EBSCO Publishing Announces Exclusive Access

EBSCO Publishing (http://www.epnet.com) said it is now the only service through which libraries can gain access to The Nation Digital Archive, which includes ongoing coverage for The Nation (America's oldest weekly magazine) in addition to backfile content beginning with volume 1, issue 1 (July 1865). In keeping with the archival nature of the database, all articles are made available as full-color PDFs, which maintain the integrity of the original printed page—including all of the graphics.

As the result of two acquisitions occurring during the last 3 years, EBSCO Publishing now owns and publishes the CINAHL and SPORTDiscus databases. Although there are only a limited number of platforms through which these databases are available, EBSCO has notified these distributors of its intent to not renew their distribution agreements for these products. In the future, these products will be made available exclusively via EBSCOhost. EBSCO encourages customers that have been accessing these databases on another platform to begin the transition to the EBSCOhost platform. EBSCO is offering a transitional period for customers using CINAHL and/or SPORTDiscus databases on platforms other than EBSCOhost, where the EBSCOhost version will be provided at no charge for the last 6 months of a subscription period.

Source: EBSCO Publishing

New U.S. Department of Energy Service Offers Alerts

Citizens can set up a free e-mail alert account and receive information on a wide variety of energy-related research through a new U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) service—ETDEWEB (http://www.etde.org/etdeweb), or Energy Technology Data Exchange World Energy Base. Information is available from 16 ETDE member countries. Users can target information of interest and then choose whether to receive updates on a weekly, biweekly, monthly, quarterly, or annual basis. Registration is required.

ETDEWEB was developed by the DOE Office of Scientific and Technical Information (OSTI), which also serves as Operating Agent to ETDE. ETDE is a group of countries under agreement to make available the widest range of energy-related research and to disseminate that information to developing countries. Through the efforts of ETDE, and in support of the G8 Energy Ministers' efforts to push energy technologies to the developing world, more than 50 developing countries have gained free access to ETDEWEB since 2004. Users can search more than 3,687,000 bibliographic records and more than 154,000 full-text documents.